Joseph Doohanhttps://www.josephdoohan.com
SEO SpecialistFri, 29 Jun 2018 10:19:47 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.820 Ways To Get Super Powerful Backlinks To Your Websitehttps://www.josephdoohan.com/powerful-backlinks-to-your-website/
https://www.josephdoohan.com/powerful-backlinks-to-your-website/#respondFri, 29 Jun 2018 10:14:40 +0000http://www.josephdoohan.com/?p=57In this post I am going to share my tips on how I acquire the best links that give my clients the best rankings and huge traffic to grow their business beyond any of their competitors.

Do not worry, there is no mention of guest posting or outreach as I hate it with a passion, it’s stupid. I’m speaking of experience as I get requests daily from people using the exact same script Brian Dean uses. Fact is, you’re not Brian and your not an authority.

I am also not going to talk about requesting a link via outreach to a webmaster who has a closely linked subject because if you do that, you’re going to have a lot of people hating on you!

20) Flippa

Flippa is an online marketplace to buy websites and apps. You can find websites that may be in your niche which you can bid on. This may not be the cheapest option to get quality backlinks to your website, however, could make a huge difference to your SEO efforts.

With Flippa you can filter websites by the amount of money they earn in a month. You can also find Google analytics reports with up to date traffic figures. Those with healthy levels of real traffic will provide you with the best link juice.

A tip is to find a website that is getting a lot of traffic and converting which is also in your niche. When you become the winning bidder and get the website transferred over to your hosting, you can then add links from the most popular pages to your own site.

19) Establish Relationships with webmasters to Swap links

The internet is a great place to connect with other people online and to find people to collaborate with in your niche.

I like to reach out to various webmasters, bloggers and those in marketing companies worldwide by complimenting their efforts. This can lead to learning new things as people generally like to help you out. It also opens opportunities to guest posting opportunities, link swaps and more.

This works way better than outreach strategies using a bland template people blast out to hundreds of blog owners looking straight up for links.

18) Help a Reporter Out

Help A Reporter Out or HARO for short, is a fantastic way to generate links from popular online publications.

One website that you can use is Helpareporter.com which provides you with leads to reporters looking for feedback from bloggers, business owners and experts in particular fields. This website is free to join and you will receive emails twice a day with a list of topics and reporters looking for help with their content.

There is also a paid option where you receive the reporter lead list before those on the free plan so that you can get your content in front of the reporters. This will improve your chances of getting your backlink published on an online publication.

17) Add Your Link To Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an opensource encyclopaedia meaning, anyone can sign up and contribute. You can add a link to your website on this website also, however, not is not straight forward.

The best approach is to sign up to Wikipedia. Start off by editing mistakes like typos, perhaps updating facts etc. Once you have made about ten or more edits that have not been reversed you can start looking for deadlinks. One approach is to look for those dead links by using the Wayback Machine to see the contents of that page before it was taken down. Simply republish the same content on an inner page on your website, adjust the date and then change the link on Wikipedia. If after two weeks, your link is still live on Wikipedia, it is likely that it will remain there.

A link from Wikipedia is nofollow, however, it can greatly build your trust rating and can be influence your rankings.

To get a link from such a resource, you will need to get your content in front of those who are publishing articles on that site regularly.

To do this, click on the author pages, in there you will find the details including social media profile links and email addresses. The next step is to connect with those authors on social media and then build rapport with them. Once you have a fantastic resource created it is then time to let them know about it.

What works best an when your content will work best is if you have a brand new news story on some highly relevant topic that is in the currently in the news.

Remember, these authors will be inundated with all types of tripe created by various losers from around the world, so that is why it is very important that you establish a relationship first before promoting your work to them.

15) Local Directories

Local directories are essential for building backlinks to improve local rankings. Many are free to sign up to and add your listing. Directories like Yelp may require a phone call or SMS verification. You should do this to ensure your link gets published.

It is important that you spend time on these listings as they will also appear in SERPs when people search your business name.

Ensure that you add your logo for brand awareness, your phone number, correct address and map location while also ensuring that you list your services/ products in your descriptions.

14) Create a Prize Award

A unique and creative way to gain backlinks to your website is to offer a yearly prize reward to those in a niche you are targeting.

You have lots of potential for how you can do this. You can do monetary prizes for:

Best website design

Best business idea

Best business innovation

You can create a press release on your award and gain links to industry magazines in your niche. Those businesses who get nominated for your award may post the news on their website that they have been nominated. They may even link to you. If they do not link to your site, kindly ask them.

You can also write a blog post with a backlink to your website for the eventual winner to post on their website.

13) Link Prize Giveaway

Trying something different, why not run a competition where you offer a cash prize for those who link to a certain page on your website.

To spark interest, get in touch with brands and bloggers who you would like to get a link from and suggest they link to you and that you will announce the cash prize winner after a certain date.

This has not been done too many times so it certainly is something that could work for you!

12) Send Samples To Bloggers

Bloggers need ideas for content and they love getting freebies and samples. If you have launched a brand-new product line, why not contact bloggers and offer to send them a free sample and get them to provide a review for their own readers.

This is a great way, not only to generate backlinks but to create brand awareness for your product and brand.

Sending samples is a great way to establish relationships with influencers as it is an effective way to build their trust in your brand.

11) Break The News First

Is there something brand new development in your area of expertise? Is there a hot new product set to sweep the nation?

If you are the first to break the news on a news story or to issue product specifications or a review, it is likely that this will help you to attract backlinks to your website.

Since you are the first to break the news, your blog/website will become the authoritative source of information for that story and those writing about it later will use your post to back up theirs.

This strategy has been the cornerstone of many of my SEO successes over the years.

10) White Papers

White papers are one of the best ways to promote your brand as an authoritative source in your niche.

If there is an area in your niche where there is a problem with no certain answer, you should consider taking advantage by doing some research such as surveying customers and report on the findings.

White papers work well to attain .edu links which are hugely valuable for SEO.

If you carry out valid research and publish a white paper, ensure that you promote it the best you can within your niche to maximise your backlinking potential.

9) Publish Survey Results

This was a backlink strategy I did a few years back, which resulted in gaining some amazingly powerful links to a personal finance blog I own. I surveyed those who signed up to receive my newsletter and published the results.

The findings were helpful for those in the customer behaviour space which got reposted on other websites. This also was a great way to publish a PR piece and raise the brand profile.

8) Testimonials

Testimonials are powerful for brands that are selling items online. It provides social proof that customers buy from those brands and are happy with the results.

Below is an example of how Aweber link out to customers who submit testimonials:

If there is something in your niche, for an example, a paid SEO tool, get in touch with the customer service team offering a testimonial. You may also get to add a link, but if you can get your business name listed, it will work as a brand mention.

7) Create A Niche Website

There is nothing to stop you for creating another website for your business and linking the two. Ensure you build some different links to the new website too so that the backlink footprint is not the same.

To ensure that you do not get hit with a penalty down the line, buy a domain with a different registrar, buy a different hosting account and change the whois information.

If you want to make sure there is no footprint, you could consider building the website on a different platform, or at least use a new theme if you prefer to use a content management system like WordPress.

6) Link Roundups

Link roundups are a really easy way to gain backlinks to your website. It is a practice for content creators to ask for the opinion of experts in particular fields for their opinions on a topic or to post an article on the best news stories from the past week.

The key strategy here is to reach out to those authors of link roundups and kindly offer your help to give your opinion for an upcoming roundup.

To go a step further, connect with those authors on their social media platforms and interact with the content that they post.

5) Create an interactive widget

One way to get lots of backlinks is to create an interactive widget which can be placed on other websites.

Such widgets coded in JavaScript could include mortgage calculators, compound interest calculators or even IP based visitor maps.

Any type of tool that could be added to a website that offers value to visitors can be a great asset to get backlinks to your website.

You will have to get one created by a freelancer so that a link to your website will be embedded into the code on the widget.

4) Broken Link Building

Broken link building is an effective way to get backlinks to your website. You will likely need to use Ahrefs or a scraping to find broken backlinks on high authority websites.

When you find posts on authoritative websites in your niche containing links that are going to 404’s, do some research into what that link was. Was it going to a blog post backing up a point? Use the Wayback Machine to find out.

If the Wayback Machine reveals it was a blog post, recreate the blog post but make it better and more up to date. Contact the editor and of the authoritative post that you want to get a backlink from and suggest that they change it to yours as the existing post is going to a 404 error.

At the end of the day, by using this approach you add value to the publisher of the website you wish to gain a link from as you will help their on page SEO by removing a 404 error which affects user experience.

3) Forum Links

Forum links are still really strong links to gain to your website. Most forums are tightly monitored because of the level of link spam online, while those that are not monitored are useless for SEO, as the life has been spammed out of the domain.

The key here for your business is to join forums only which are relevant to your niche. Such forums can also help you to establish new relationships with those in your niche. The more you contribute to these forums, the more authoritative you and your brand become.

If you have useful resources on your own website, post a link only to answer a question or back up a point. Also if you go into an old post which has not been active in the past year, you risk getting banned.

A lot of forums use the same software which have spam guards that can block your IP. If you get banned from one forum, you may also see yourself prevented from signing up again or even joining another similar forum.

2) Get links from Suppliers / Clients

This has to be not only the easiest, but one of the most effective ways to boost your rankings on SERPs. If you have suppliers who also have websites, you need to make sure that you have a link from their website pointing at yours.

By getting suppliers backlinks you will gain highly authoritative and niche relevant links to power your website up the SERPs. Suppliers links are generally strong as they are likely to have spent years of PR campaigns etc, attending tradeshows etc. to boost their own brand awareness.

It becomes a win-win for both you and your suppliers as you can potentially sell more of their products.

If you are a B2B company with a good relationship with your customers, you could do some type of collaboration that would allow your link to be placed on their website.

1) Get an authorship With Forbes /Mashable/Entreprenuer

The best backlinks in the world come from sites like Forbes, Mashable, Entrepreneur and similar large online publications. To get a mention on these website, you need to have a hugely authoritative brand and be the centre of news stories.

You could get a mention by building relationships with contributors and authors of these websites. It is difficult to get recognised by these contributors as everyone else is trying the same strategy.

Mashable is a website that allows people to join as a contributor. To do so, you need to sign up not as a business owner or SEO specialist, but as someone who genuinely wants to create content for the publication. You will need to create a number of pieces of work before you actually link to your own website, as the editor may flag your work as being self-promotional.

]]>https://www.josephdoohan.com/powerful-backlinks-to-your-website/feed/0What Is A Backlink In SEO And How Do I Start Building Backlinks To My Sitehttps://www.josephdoohan.com/what-is-a-backlink-in-seo/
https://www.josephdoohan.com/what-is-a-backlink-in-seo/#respondWed, 30 May 2018 09:56:29 +0000http://www.josephdoohan.com/?p=55If you are new to search engine optimisation (SEO) you will very likely have heard of the term “backlink” it is an essential element of SEO and in this post I explain what exactly they are, how to build them, especially those that boost your traffic to huge heights.

What is a backlink on a website?

A backlink also known as an incoming link or an inbound link is a hyperlink on one website leading to another.

Inbound links can result in higher rankings, quicker indexing of new pages and extra traffic to your website.

Why are backlinks so important?

Backlinks are important for search engine optimisation as they are ranking factors for many of the most used search engines such as Google.

The inbound links from one website to another can be considered as a vote or recommendation.

Incoming links are trust factor and considered as such by Google, but only if they come from trusted domains which too have good backlinks linking to them.

Google base all pages on the web in terms of “pagerank”. There was a time when the pagerank for websites were revealed, however, this resulted excessive spamming and other black hat SEO techniques that webmasters used to rank poor websites with no value prior to Google Panda update in 2011.

SEO’s will argue that pagerank is dead and rightly so for non Google analysis. There are SEO tools like Moz, Ahrefs and Majestic that offer metrics on how authoritative a website is. However, they should only be taken lightly as they are only a metric.

Backlinks pass “link juice”, which is the SEO value of a link from one web page to another. The more authority a backlink has, the more link juice will pass to the webpage which it is linking to.

What is an example of a backlink?

I am going to answer this in several ways. First the basics:

The image below is a simple backlink. Website 1 has a hyperlink that is going to website 2.

The second example is a high quality backlink from an authoritative website.

In this case, website 1 has a number of backlinks from different websites. If they are all linking from relevant niches or from high authority websites like Forbes and/or Lifehack website 1 will be a highly authoritative website.

As a result link juice will be passed on to website 2 and will help the site in terms of its rankings.

The third example is a low quality backlink from a spam website.

In this case, website 1 has backlinks coming from spam comments and spun private blog networks. These type of links will provide no influence what so ever for your website ranking and will likely result in a drop in SERPs and traffic.

The quality of backlinks will also depend on whether the link is a no-follow or a do-follow backlink. Below we show you the difference between the two types of links.

What is a No Follow link?

A no follow link is a backlink from one web page to another that does not pass link juice. No follow links were created to reduce the level of spam on the internet. That is why most blog commenting platforms are set with the nofollow tag to prevent the amount of comment spam and to deter those who continue to engage in this black hat SEO technique.

A no follow link can be created on any page with the following HTML tag:

<a href=”http://www.a-domain.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>

Are all nofollow links bad?

If you have a nofollow link pointing to your website, it may still be fantastic news for your site. Highly authoritative websites like Wikipedia and Forbes nofollow most of their outbound link. As such sites are highly authoritative and trusted by Google, having a link to your website from these sources, will be counted by search engines as a trust factor.

What is a Do Follow link?

A Do Follow backlink therefore, is a link that passes link juice from a web page to another. If a web page has a lot of do follow links coming from lots of other quality websites, then Google recognises that it must be a good web page so it should be ranked higher as a result in search engine positions (SERPs).

How do I get backlinks to my website?

There are many ways to build backlinks, however most strategies are difficult to carry out.

Backlinks can vary from:

Social media profiles

Blog comments

Business listings

Niche directories

Forums

Niche classified websites

Editorials

Resource pages

You can gain quality backlinks if you have quality blog posts on your website that people may link to in order to back up points that they may be making.

Backlink strategies are different for every website as you may have a business website or a niche blog.

Below we will talk about what makes and excellent backlink strategy for businesses who are looking to boost their rankings.

What is a good backlink strategy?

If you are a business it is essential that you start with your foundational backlinks. We will cover “foundational backlinks” in more depth below.

How to build foundational backlinks?

Your foundational links are the first set of backlinks that you will build to your website. The type of links you should build initially should include:

Social Media Backlinks

Firstly, you should look at getting a link on the major social media platforms and setting up a page on each for your business.

Social media websites to set up a page for include:

Facebook

Twitter

Google+

Linkedin

Pinterest

YouTube

It is very important that you add as much information about your business on these profiles in the about information sections etc. Mention your customer types you serve, products you offer, services you offer and locations serviced as such details may appear in searches and provide the best opportunity to get as many visitors to your brand pages as possible.

Social media backlinks are generally no follow links, however they will improve your authority and Google will recognise your business as a genuine entity.

Local Business Directories

Next ensure your business is listed in the local business directories. When submitting websites to directories, ensure you use only local directories and not “website directories”.

Most general website directories that publish your listing and a link to your website are considered by Google as spam. Ensure that you only add your website to trusted local directories like:

Google Maps

BingPlaces

Yelp

Foursquare

Check out this hubspot list for a full list of local business directories and listings websites.

You should also look at adding your website to geo-based directories that may be based in your local area. To find those simply copy and paste the following search strings into a Google search.

city + directory

directory + city

How Do I Define Backlink Quality?

One of the simplest ways to check whether the website you are looking to place a link is of good quality is to check whether the site is indexed or not.

You can do this by:

Doing a Google Search for the name of the site you are thinking of getting a link from

Put the following search string into Google: site:http://www.websitedomain.com/ – If no results appear it means the site may have been deindexed.

Another way to check whether you should get a link from your website is to check the website yourself and consider whether you trust the site yourself and would you like your business to be associated with the site?

If the site has text that is not human readable, contains annoying popups and spammy looking ads, then you

What links should I avoid?

In the previous section, you would have got a gist of how you define backlink quality. The links you should avoid are as follows:

General website directories

Article directories

Websites that are totally irrelevant to yours

Private blog networks (PBNs)

Link farms

SEO gigs offered on Fiverr and similar micro task job sites

There will be a lot of people who will be disagreeing with me on the PBNs. This is a grey hat seo technique rather than black hat, but it is not white hat either.

Basically what you should not do is buy a guest post from someone who owns a PBN. This is simply setting yourself up for a Google penalty down the line. Such PBN backlinks that you find on websites like Fiverr and seo forums are extremely risky as they generally use spammy content that could raise a red flag by a Google crawler.

What Tools Should I Use For Building Backlinks?

I do not recommend that you use any SEO tools or software that automatically creates backlinks for you.

There are tools that can help you find backlinks that your competitors have. These links can help you reverse engineer inbound links to your own website.

Ahrefs, SEMrush and MOZ are useful tools to provide you with information on what websites are linking to your competitors. Ahrefs provides the most details on the quality of the links. The best quality links to your competitors are those that you should work on to get linking to your website.

Backlinks to your website are vital to improving your rankings on SERPs. However, is very important, that you get your on-site seo correct on your website first. Without excellent, engaging and quality content that your visitors find useful and interact with backlinks become meaningless.

Links are part of the puzzle that is SEO. It is a task that should be ongoing for best results.